Parker: “Hi everyone, my name is Parker Butler, and this is Politics with Parker Season 2, Episode 18. In this weekly series, I break down the latest political news, and offer some commentary on how to get people—especially young people—engaged in politics and energized about the issues that we as a generation are going to inherit. I’ve got another great interview this week. But before I want to offer some background. As I’ve talked about previously, the House of Representatives could very well flip to the Democrats this year, with a national environment that is showing itself to be increasingly hostile to the party currently in power. At the center of this effort is a guy named Randy Bryce. He’s a veteran and a union worker in Wisconsin who calls himself “Iron Stache”, for his signature moustache. And he’s gained national attention in recent months for his campaign to unseat the Speaker of the House, who many people know, Paul Ryan.”

Randy Bryce clip: “I think it’s time — let’s trade places. Paul Ryan, you can come work the iron, and I’ll go to D.C. We can do so much better as a community, and our future depends on it.”

Parker: “On top of the attention he’s received, he’s raised considerable cash, raising $1.2 million dollars in just the last quarter of 2017.
In politics, candidates are almost always the center of attention for both the voters and the media. But often times what goes unnoticed are the complicated inner workings behind the scenes. The interwoven branches that constitute a campaign can be messy, from pollsters, to consultants, to field staff, to fundraising — all of these help to craft a message and a method of outreach whose ultimate goal is to translate into votes. To put a spotlight on this, I talked with Randy Bryce’s communications director, Lauren Hitt. She’s also worked for the Mayor of Philadelphia, the now-Mayor of New York City’s campaign, Vice President Joe Biden, and the Obama re-election campaign, among others. I talked with her about their efforts to reach out to key groups, particularly young people, to pull off an upset win against the Speaker this November, as well as her general experience being in politics for 6 years.”

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Parker: “So you’re the communications director for one of the most well-known 2018 House candidates. You’ve worked in other administrations and campaigns as well. Why did you decide to hop on Randy Bryce’s campaign?”

Lauren: “I think he really can beat Paul Ryan. I mean we’ve never quite been in an environment like we are now. We’ve seen incredible election results that you would never have expected, whether it was down in Alabama, Virginia was an incredibly close race that was remarkable not only because we won the governor’s race there, but because of all the House seats they flipped there in the state legislature that had traditionally gone for Republicans. We just saw the same thing here in Wisconsin where a state legislative district that has always gone for public went to Trump by like 17 points just went to a Democrat. So you’re kind of seeing this groundswell and people can have different opinions about what it’s in reaction to, and Randy has definitely been apart of that. And you’ve seen, it manifests itself in the amount of money he’s been able to raise just through small dollar donations. Last quarter he raised 1.2 million dollars and the average donation was about 24 dollars. These are people chipping in five, ten bucks at a time but it’s adding up in a tremendous way.”

Parker: “Alright. So as a communications director, what’s it like being in that position, in terms of the everyday responsibilities?”

Lauren: “It can really range depending on the campaign or the administration that you’re in. For Randy’s campaign, and it’s actually my first week here, it’s making sure that he has all of his remarks ready for an event he’s doing, it’s answering inquiries, it’s keeping in mind the larger message frame that the campaign is try to stay in and making sure all of our other communication mediums wind up into that. And it’s working with a really great team of people who are all extraordinarily talented and young and excited, and have kind of gotten locked into this campaign that not only has made waves locally, but across the country.”

Parker: “A lot of times the connotation that comes with working in politics, especially campaigns, is that it’s ruthless and cold-blooded. Would you agree with that or do you think that’s a mischaracterization?”

Lauren: “I think it very much depends on the campaign that you’re working on. I have the privilege in this campaign of working with a lot of young people who are just really inspired by Randy, his message and the potential of what he has to do. You can be on campaigns where maybe an elected official has been around for a little bit longer and everybody is a lot older, and I guess in a sense they feel they have more to lose, and the incumbent has a lot more to lose, those races can get particularly ugly. But I’ve been lucky enough, both in this campaign and on the Obama campaign, and de Blasio for New York, that everyone I worked with was pretty young and joined it because they had a vision for the future, not because they were trying to drag somebody else down.”

Parker: “I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that, compared to others in your field, you’re pretty young, and so to have this kind of success record — has your age, or also being a woman operating in the inner-workings of politics, has that sort of been something that has come with lots of its own barriers along the way? And if so, would you characterize those barriers as overt or subtle?”

Lauren: “Well, everybody on campaigns is generally pretty young, so I didn’t feel it so much as a barrier when I was on campaigns. But when I went into city government in Philadelphia as the mayor’s communications director at 23, I definitely was conscious of it then. And I’m sure other people noticed it as well and I think, whether it was because of my gender or my age, they sometimes probably didn’t take my opinion the same way they would have taken them if I was a little bit older. But I really did find in Philadelphia, and I think most people have found on campaigns, that the hardest working people, and the people with the best ideas, tend to rise to the top and do well. A lot of the people in Obama administration were kids and kind of got on the campaign with this guy who just skyrocketed. So, I think in general there’s an attitude, at least on the Democratic side of politics that age necessarily isn’t indicative of a lack of intelligence or value.”

Parker: “Okay. For the time that you’ve been in politics, have you noticed any changes or developments with regards to how messaging and outreach is done?

Lauren: “Oh definitely. I joke all the time with people that, as someone who got my start in traditional communications, meaning working with reporters, that I’m already out of date at 26 years old. You know people are just communicating so much better and so much more effectively when they’re reaching out directly to their voters. That’s kind of a consequence of the decline of the reach of journalism — the manifestation of Facebook and Twitter and all these other social media platforms, so yeah even in the 6 or 7 years that I’ve been working and politics digital has grown and has become a tremendous tool — for good and for bad in politics. And I still enjoy working with reporters and I still do think they make a big difference terms of shaping the narrative and reaching people, but that has been a big shift in terms of digital being equal, if not more important than traditional media.”

Parker: “So on the topic of young people in particular, I can attest, I’m sure you can as well, that there are more people engaged now than is typically expected in an off-year like this. How does outreach and messaging differ generationally and what do you see as important ways to get young people out to vote?

Lauren: “I think you always have to give people something to vote for as well as again. I think you have to effectively communicate to people not only what they lose if they don’t vote, but what they can gain if they do. So really providing that motivation. I think we’ve seen, not just for young people but for human social behavior across the board that people are a lot more inclined to do things if they think that their neighbors or their friends are doing it. So conveying it as an important group activity or something that’s interesting or attractive to do is very important. And really just — it’s like selling anything else in some ways. It’s just making it exciting to people, making them feel apart of it and connected to it to and understanding how it’s going to improve their lives, and really connecting and breaking through the noise. More so than ever, breaking through the noise is probably a challenge that campaigns, and anyone, faces. People are just kind of so plugged into their respective sources of media and their different social media platforms, that to connect to their individual world gets increasingly difficult.”

Parker: “Speaking about Wisconsin’s 1st congressional district, it’s a blue collar working class area, it’s over 90 percent white. How does the messaging in this area differ from previous campaigns and administrations that you’ve been apart of?”

Lauren: “In some ways it really doesn’t. I think there’s this idea that you have to talk to blue collar people a certain way, and that you can’t talk to them the way you’d talk to a more urban environment. I think that’s kind of wrong. Everybody’s a person, everybody has the same human values and needs. I think people can tell when you’re treating them like they’re somehow different or odd. I think that people in Wisconsin are just like people in Philadelphia or New York in the sense that they’re working as hard as they ever have been, they’re working harder than their parents have, and they’re getting less out of it. And they’re watching wealthy people, whether in Wisconsin or New York get richer and richer. And they’re upset, and they feel like they’ve played by the rules and they’ve done hard work and they don’t understand why they’re not getting ahead as much as their parents did, or maybe even not getting ahead at all. When you have severe income inequality the way we do in this country that it’s no longer restricted to New York City, though it’s most evident there because you have deep poverty alongside ridiculous billion dollar buildings. It’s felt here too in Wisconsin. People aren’t blind, they can see what’s going on and they feel that the game is getting rigged against them. They’re doing everything right and they’re not moving forward.”

Parker: “I have to talk a little bit about the President, it’s sort of an inevitable topic, but Wisconsin’s 1st district did vote for Trump by about 10 points [source: Daily Kos Elections], of course as we know Wisconsin was one of the key states that gave Trump the electoral college victory. Is there a communications strategy to reach out to these Trump voters? Or, since it’s a midterm, is there more of a reliance on a communications strategy that drives Democratic turnout?”

Lauren: “I think Trump is very much a part of the national conversation, and certainly Randy does not support the President, and he doesn’t really think he’s worthy of the office. But we’re running against Paul Ryan, that’s our focus. I think people see a distinction between the two. I think we know that a lot of people voted for Trump who voted for Obama in 2008. This district went to Obama then. They’re not necessarily party-identified voters. They voted for someone who they felt like connected with them for whatever reason. And so I think the real strategy, if you have to relate it to Trump at all, is to, in a positive way and in a way that doesn’t seek to divide-and-conquer, or to exclude, tap into whatever feeling it was a Trump reached in people, whether that was feeling like they had been ignored, or that we [Democrats] didn’t focus enough on the economy, and that’s kind of like the central issues in people’s lives — whatever you think it was that he effectively tapped into, that’s kind of what you have to try and find a way to touch. Obviously Democrats are never going to go out there and dog whistle and make derisive comments about people of different races or religions, but I tend to believe that most people, and certainly the people of Wisconsin, are inherently good, and they didn’t vote for him because they agree with a racist thing he said. It’s because what he said tapped into something deeper, and I think when you can find that and turn it into something positive and hopeful, people are inherently going to want to reach for something good and hopeful rather than something bad and ugly.”

Parker: “Yeah. And you can even see that Wisconsin’s kind of shifting back blue, you know with that special election and the approval ratings of the president.
So as we know, the political atmosphere can be all over the place, it can completely shift in a matter of hours, especially these days, and as communications director in a campaign against the current Speaker of the House, is it a challenge to be constantly reacting and crafting a message in response to the latest national developments?”

Lauren: “Somewhat yeah. I think you do your best that you can and to plan and to have a coordination strategy for the week, or even the day. And then you can find yourself at noon being like, ‘nevermind, you do this then, write up this statement real quick’. So I think, you know, you’re just a little bit more on your toes. But it’s not boring, it’s interesting, I think it’s good that we live in a world where people are hyper-aware of small changes like that, I think probably for a long time things moved as quickly as they did in Congress today or yesterday with the spending bill, but people just weren’t as aware. Because they got the morning news report and they didn’t know that by 11 o’clock that 8 a.m. paper was old. I think it’s good to have increased awareness for people who are interested of what’s going on. It does mean we have to work a little bit harder, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

Parker: “And that was my interview with Lauren Hitt. That’s all I’ve got for this week, my name is Parker Butler and thank you for listening.”